Label: Parlophone, Warner Bros.

Produced by: Damon Albarn, The Twilite Tone

The structure of Gorillaz as a “digital” band, focused on a rotating cast of guests, well positioned the group to be both a zeitgeist of style-at-the-time, and to be able to adapt to the same. As the group has now spanned a couple generations of shifts in how music is delivered (from CD to iPods; from iPods to streaming), and given how quickly the modern listener cycles through trends, they’ve had to be the latter. On Humanz, Damon Albarn and producer The Twilite Tone make this type of Adapt or Die approach sound incredibly laid back, for better and worse: The better is that the album is pretty much all singles, a non-stop party; the worse is that an apparent message / theme of a commoditized / resource-stripped world (Albarn supposedly tasking the creatives with imagining a Donald Trump presidency, before it’d actually occurred) is undetectable ‘neath this party – it’s a spectacularly empty-headed album, and feels generally shallower when “deeper” lyrics are trickled in.

The adaptation for Gorillaz, circa 2017, involves a lot of hyper-glossy hip-hop and funk: catchy beats, catchy hooks, and memorable choruses. And the bevy of stars – big names, all – are no slouches, delivering tight, flowing verses, or occasionally inspired and/or wholly impassioned vocal additions. But the behind-the-scenes stories of Albarn picking from reams of recording snippets, and sanitization – removing direct political references – can be heard in how clean and perfect every track is, flowing along expected lines and never pausing for any real experimentation. This renders the appeal as ephemeral, but that feels truly by design: while the lyrics of the more emotive tracks (the solo Albarn Busted and Blue; the vocal dynamics by Anthony Hamilton on Carnival) are, as mentioned, a bit cringey, it’s noteworthy that these moments come as a bundled lump on the album, after a bevy of instant-hit grooves, and are followed by the 1-2 of the bait-clicky “Murder Sex Party” – which is just another funky single, but with a weird title – and singalong feelgood closer “The Power;” that is: Humanz has been chopped and edited to the extremes of accessibility. If there’s commentary here, it feels more along those lines: achieving this level of gloss makes the songs so universally palatable as to be… artificial. Inhuman. The fake band, whose frontman almost wholly retreats to the sidelines, crafting plastic music.

Again, though, I’d highlight that such extreme management of the sound is an incredible craft, and Albarn and TTT’s efforts in making the front 2/3rds of this album flow together so well while still allowing for distinct singles – the general cadence and structure of these songs are very similar, but they each are identifiable and not repetitive when strung together – it’s truly impressive. And honestly, despite not liking the radio single style all that much, I’d give the bubblegum flavor of it a higher ranking… if not for those juxtaposingly more directly dour tracks. They throw an unfavorable contrast upon things, firstly because the messaging is simplistic, which kinda dulls the appealing ignorance of what preceded, and secondly because some cuts – maybe especially the Grace Jones track – remind of the potential weird creativity of Albarn, and it’s a bummer we don’t hear more of that.

But: Adapt or Die. And the music of 2017 vibed with this bouncey, fleeting style, and Gorillaz did their due diligence in dropping a bouncey, fleeting album almost exclusively of funky bangers.